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nativism The view that some important aspects of perception and of other cognitive processes are innate.
natural selection The explanatory principle by which Darwin accounted for biological evolution. It refers to the greater likelihood of successful reproduction for those organisms possessing attributes that are advantageous in a given environment. If these attributes are hereditary, then they will be well represented in the next generation, and, if the process continues over many generations, it can result in wholesale changes in bodily form and behavior.
NE See norepinephrine.
negative afterimage In color vision, the persistence of an image that possesses the hue complementary to that of the stimulus (e.g., seeing a yellow afterimage after staring at a blue lamp), resulting from the operation of opponent processes.
negative cognitive schema For Aaron Beck, the core cognitive component of depression, consisting of an individual's automatic negative interpretations concerning himself, his future, and the world. See also explanatory style.
negative feedback See feedback.
negative symptoms of schizophrenia Symptoms that involve deficits in normal functioning, such as apathy, impoverished speech, and emotional blunting. See also positive symptoms of schizophrenia.
neglect syndrome The result of certain lesions of the right parietal lobe that leave a patient inattentive to stimuli to her left (e.g., not eating food on the left side of the plate) and result in her ignoring the left side of her body (e.g., putting makeup on only the right side of her face).
neocortex The outermost, convoluted layer of the forebrain, often referred to merely as the cortex.
neo-Freudians A group of theorists who accept the psychoanalytic conception of unconscious conflicts but who differ with Freud in ways that can include (1) describing these conflicts in social terms rather than in terms of bodily pleasures or frustrations, (2) maintaining that many of these conflicts arise from specific cultural conditions instead of being biologically preordained.
nerve growth factor A neurochemical that promotes the sprouting of new neuronal connections.
nerve impulse See action potential.
network models Theories of cognitive organization, especially of semantic memory, which hold that items of information are represented by a system of nodes linked through associative connections. See also connectionist model, distributed representations, local representations, node.
neural correlates The events in the nervous system that happen at the same time as (and are thus correlated with) the mental or behavioral events we hope to explain.
neural plasticity The capacity for neurons to alter their functioning as a result of experience.
neural plate A small thickening, running the length of the embryo, from which the neural tube and, eventually, the nervous system, develop.
neural stem cells Cells within the fetus that are the developmental precursors of neurons.
neural tube The tubular structure, formed by the fusion of the edges of the neural plate, from which the central nervous system (forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain, and spinal cord) develops.
neurodevelopmental disorder A disorder that stems from early brain abnormalities. Many researchers believe that schizophrenia is one such disorder and may originate in abnormal fetal brain development.
neurofibrillary tangles Stringy debris observed in the brain as a consequence of the neuron degeneration in Alzheimer's disease.
neurogenesis The process through which the nervous system grows and develops, a process including cellular signaling, differentiation, migration and proliferation.
neuroimaging techniques Methods that permit noninvasive study and depiction of brain structure or function. See also CT scan, MRI, functional MRI scan, and PET scan.
neuromuscular junction The location where a motoneuron meets a muscle fiber; activation of this neuron causes the muscle fiber to contract.
neuron A nerve cell.
neuropeptide Y (NPY) A chemical found widely in the brain and periphery. In the brain, it acts as a neurotransmitter; when administered at sites in and near the hypothalamus, it is a potent elicitor of eating.
neuropsychologists Investigators who draw claims about brain-behavior relationships, using evidence from cases of brain damage, plus close observation of the changes in function associated with that damage.
neurosis A broad term once used for mental disorders whose primary symptoms are anxiety or what seem to be defenses against anxiety. Since the adoption of DSM-III, the term has been dropped as a broad diagnostic label, and what were once considered the various subcategories of neurosis (e.g., phobia, anxiety, conversion and dissociative disorders) are now classified as separate disorders.
neurotoxin Any chemical poisonous to neurons.
neurotrophic factors Chemicals that influence developing neural cells.
NGF See nerve growth factor.
node A point in a network at which a number of connections converge.
nodes of Ranvier The gaps occurring between the glial-cell wrappers that form the myelin sheath surrounding many kinds of axons. The nodes are crucial to the rapidity at which neural impulses travel along myelinated axons.
nominal scale A scale in which responses are ordered only into different categories. See also categorical scale, interval scale, ordinal scale, ratio scale.
nonfluent aphasia Speech disorder in which the main difficulty is in speech production, often involving damage to Broca's area in the frontal lobe.
norepinephrine (NE) The neurotransmitter found in the nerves of the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. It is also one of the neurotransmitters involved in various arousal systems in the brain.
normal curve A symmetrical, bell-shaped curve that describes the probability of obtaining various combinations of chance events. It depicts the normal distribution, the frequency distribution of many physical and psychological attributes of humans and animals.
normal distribution A frequency distribution whose graphic representation has a symmetrical, bell-shaped form — the normal curve. Its characteristics are often referred to when investigators test statistical hypotheses and make inferences about the population from a given sample.
norms In intelligence testing, the scores taken from a large sample of the population against which an individual's test scores are evaluated.
NPY See neuropeptide Y.
nucleus accumbens A dopamine-rich area in the forebrain that is critical in the physiology of reward.
null hypothesis The hypothesis that an obtained difference is merely a chance fluctuation from a population in which the true mean difference is zero.
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